Vast offers developer tools

SAN MATEO, Calif.  Vast Systems Technology Corp. has released a software development environment called Meteor to complement its Comet hardware/software co-design environment.

The Meteor tool works as a cockpit for software developers and supports the software development process required to write and debug real-time and embedded software for presilicon target systems, said Graham Hellestrand, Vast president and chief executive officer.

"Where Comet is used for architectural assessment and investigation and hardware/software co-verification, Meteor serves as a real-time embedded-software environment that sits beside Comet," said Hellestrand. "Instead of software developers having to go through the edit-link-execute stage on a host processor, they now are able to do that directly on a virtual target processor."

To boot an operating system takes seconds on a VPM compared with hours on instruction-set-simulator models, Hellestrand said.

"It gives engineers the ability to look into the architecture of the processor and multiprocessor architecture to instrument it," said Hellestrand. "This way they can see what exactly is happening in terms of bottlenecks."

Hellestrand said the tool also allows software engineers to give feedback to system architects and hardware engineers on the optimal parameters of a given architecture.

Hellestrand said Meteor lets software engineers use the software chain they are most familiar with, and the tool works with popular commercial debuggers from companies such as ARM, Cignus, and the DSP Group.

Meteor is available immediately, priced between $5,000 and $25,000 for single-processor versions, depending on quantities.